Never heard of the Electronic Frontier Foundation? The foundation recently marked its 16th anniversary. Its mission is to protect the civil rights of Netizens (that’s citizens on the Internet) from government encroachment.

Some have called the San Francisco-based foundation a high-tech ACLU. At 16, if the foundation were a superhero, it would only be Superboy, not yet Superman.

It’s ironic that while the elected representatives in Washington, D.C., the Bush administration and huge entertainment conglomerates are working to restrict rights in the virtual world, the foundation, a private organization, is fighting to defend those freedoms.

The foundation’s most recent action came this year, when the EFF filed a lawsuit accusing AT&T of illegally cooperating with the National Security Agency to make phone and Internet communication records available without warrants.

Kevin Bankston, an EFF staff attorney, said the lawsuit is “quite possibly the most important privacy and free speech issue in the 21st century.”

The EFF has also fought to defend peer-to-peer file-sharing software. The software has come under fire from the music industry and movie studios that have demonized the new technology because it can be used illegally, and sought to stamp it out through litigation. It’s the equivalent of wanting to ban knives because they can be used to hurt people. Such suits could have a chilling effect on innovation.

We hope the EFF has many more anniversaries and continues its work toward protecting our rights on the Internet.